Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis Of News Reports

Critical discourse analysis aims to explore the dialectical relationship between discourse and ideology and to reveal the underlying ideologies hidden in the language. It provides theories and methods for the study of news discourse, which is helpful for the readers and researchers to know about the news reporters’real intentions and the historical and social background of the news discourse.In this paper, the author would analyze the news reports on Mo Yan, the first Chinese novelist who wins 2012 Nobel Literature Prize in the American and Chinese mainstream media, with the aim to unveil the hidden messages and underlying ideologies and to display the image of China depicted in American media. The data are selected from seven Chinese and American mainstream newspapers, China Daily, 21st Century, Beijing Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times, The News Week. Their publication time range from October 2012 to December 2012, that is, from Mo Yan’s winning 2012 Nobel Literature Prize to the award ceremony of the Nobel Prize.Fairclough regards news as the combination of text, discursive practice and social practice. And Halliday holds that the nature of language is closely related to the functions it has to serve. Therefore, the author employs Fairclough’s three dimensional-model of CD A and incorporates the idea of Halliday’s system functional grammar in contrastive analysis. Through the textual analysis, the thesis studies how linguistic features express social ideology by analyzing classification and passivization, because lexical choice is embedded in the ideologies which determined how the reporter will report the news, and the use of passivization can reveal the reporter’s motivation. Then, she analyzes the reporting modes and the verbs in reports to realize that the attitude of the reporter decides the choice of modal auxiliary verbs, and indirect speech is employed by reporter to incorporate his own view. By analyzing the social context, she detects the hidden ideologies which influence the choice of words in the reports.Through the critical analysis of news discourse, the author confirms that there are political tendency and ideologies hidden in news reports, which include not only the discourse related to politics, racism and gender discrimination, but also the neutral news such as Mo Yan’s winning 2012 Nobel Literature Prize. Therefore, it can be convincingly stated that ideologies exist everywhere. At the same time, the author hopes to help promote the readers’capacity of critical reading and critical awareness so that they would not be easily affected by the journalists. It is expected to give some enlightenment on foreign language teaching and learning so that English learners may have a better understanding of English texts, news reports in particular.